Free to Play Police: Killer Instinct’s Idea of “Free” Ep. 6

Remember when you went to the store, bought the latest fighting game, and came home to kick the crap out of everyone? Remember how easy that was? Well just WAIT until you check out how easy “FREE” makes the process as we take a look at Microsoft’s latest “free” offering in Killer Instinct!

Let us know what you think and if you’d like to see more of this kind of content in the future!

the author

Mike "Magicman" Byrne has been a part of the MMOBomb family for years and serves as the site's current Editor-in-Chief. His love for MMOs and gaming in general has led him to covering games for numerous websites including Gamebreaker TV and XIV Nation where he proudly displays his fanboy flag for FFXIV:ARR.

You guys are still missing one key point that makes this free. Characters are rotated out on a bi weekly rotation. Jago was just rotated in on the 6th it was the wolf character at launch so its already changed once.

And again this isn’t an mmo.
And the argument that you cover free games is also null since you mention things like black desert, guild wars 2

btw since your such a great journalist and all i guess you probably didn’t miss this
your best bet it to follow https://twitter.com/DaveMcNinja on twitter for updates to the rotating character.
It happens on a biweekly/3 week change give or take. You don’t know whom it will be until it’s posted.
April 6th
Jago is Free to Play in #KISeason3 on XBOX One and Windows 10. A new character will be rotated every Wednesday

your welcome
the game is free with a different form of character rotation. You guys really need to get over putting games on your website to bash them as if they’re threating mmo existance or something. It’s not other games faults no one is making mmos that create grindy gameplay that probably drives people away

Honestly, this is a pretty stupid video. They say you can play all of the game modes for free with one fighter. Nothing about that is misleading. You can play it for free, Yeah you get just one character but they don’t make its seem in any way that you get everything for free. The only thing that could be misleading is it saying free in the store but if you just read the description of the game you will see where it says free to play just one fighter in all game modes. You make it seem like they are trying to trick people in to downloading it when that is not the case. It is very obvious its just one fighter. The Company itself isn’t saying its a free to play title. Some sites might advertise it as that, but that is their own misconception. It just says fight for free. Which you can do.

Sorry guys, usually your content isn’t too bad, but this episode is nonsense. This is essentially a demo, not a f2p game. That’s why they say, it’s not free to play. Now, the advertising on their page saying it’s “free” might be stretching is a little, point taken, yet I’d argue that its true. The base of the game with one character is free. Everything else you can buy. You can argue about the costs and bundles and whatnot, but they said from the beginning that this is not a f2p title. Saying that they are obviously refering to the established f2p buiness-model, as used in LoL etc. KI is a game that you’re supposed to buy, if you want to play it. However, if you never tried Killer Instinct or a fighting game (which are hard to get into btw), you have the option of downloading a bare bones free version. That’s the point, people might not just want to buy into a 60$ title without seeing how it plays first. To repeat myself, this is a demo, not a f2p game.

Regarding the bundles (and correct me if I’m wrong here), according to my (short) research, you can get every character that is available at this point (25 characters?) for 60$. So that is basically your 60$ full game price tag right there. On top of that there is the option to try it for free. So I really don’t get your complaint. Also, imagine I am a guy, who only likes to play a certain amout of characters, so instead of having to pay 60 and get everything, I can actually pay less and just take the ones I like? That sounds pretty fair to me.
And every new character that is released past that Season 3 thing, you can consider DLC or an expansion. That would have happend with a 60$ price tag from the start as well. To conclude my post, I think that is a very fair way to price a game and I honestly think most of your arguments are short sighted. The only more or less legitimate critique, is them using the word “free” as part of their advertising on the webiste.

It’s basically a demo . And your site is called mmo… this isnt an mmo its a fighter game . I guess if you stuck to your category you wouldn’t have anything to talk about since no ones releasing anything new that could possibly get hype. And mmos entire purpose being free is to give the option to the person that cant control themself to way overpay for a game in the 10s of thousands to get end game gear such as archeage. So yeah its really hypocritical.

But yeah you could say that the mmo market is the real introduction to the mainstream gaming console like games of thinking they could get away with charging 60 dollars for dlc every year.

And the graphics level of this game go way beyond a cash in skin game like league of legends. So if your gonna bash this you might as well bash your whole career